Process Planning in Industry 4.0 Environment

Over the past few years world is facing the fourth industrial revolution. Working environment is demanded to be changed, rapidly, with hope that it will bring significant benefits in the future. Usual manufacturing processes are being automatized and connected to other activities within the company. One of the most important factors in Industry 4.0 environment is data management, big data management to be correct. It is done with use of cyber-physical systems (CPS), internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing. Human professions are obligated to adapt and change so the roles that are known are suggested to get a different structure in the future. Workers have to learn to deal with new situation and accept the term of life-learning process, constantly improving their performance. In the end, with use of both technological and human improvements, bigger productivity, product quality and income with lower product delivery (manufacturing) time and product price are expected. Apart from that, the term of mass customization has become very important and that demands very flexible manufacturing. This paper will deal with change the role of process planner who will be presented as “product planner” in the environment of Industry 4.0. Product planner is not only new profession, but is the name of software that is being connected to other parts of supply chain and uses advanced optimization algorithms to generate process plan, order of operations and scheduling automatically. The idea and structure of “product planning software” will be presented, as a completely new approach to process planning, operation sequencing and scheduling.